"I should note that as with other 480GB SandForce-driven SSD's, *any* SandForce 2281 SSD with a capacity greater than 256GB will see a dip in 4K IOPS performance. This is due to the way the SF controller handles the mapping of LBA's. To double capacity from 240GB to 480GB, the SandForce controller's finite number of allocations must be reconfigured to utilize 8KB blocks (up from the standard 4KB - intentionally matched to the NTFS 4KB cluster size). This negatively impacts IOPS performance as a 4KB random write translates to the equivalent of an 8KB random write once the added overhead is taken into account.

This is also clear in the Intel specs, as incompressible 4KB writes see a near 50% cut when comparing the 480GB to the 240GB capacity points."